The journey of the Traveling Academy, started in 2007 under the inspiring guidance of acclaimed U.S.-Romanian theatre director Andrei Serban, continues this year with ten new actors and a third project presented by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York. Following a two-week summer residency in Romania, and a subsequent workshop in NYC, join us for this special event of the Traveling Academy, presented in collaboration with the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The CUNY Graduate Center.

Among the participating actors, coming from different cities and companies, are some of the leading figures of the young performing arts scene in Romania: Ioana Barbu, Andreea Bibiri, Lia Bugnar, Boris Gaza, Radu Iacoban, Marius Manole, Maria Obretin, Liliana Pana, Ioana Pavelescu, and Matei Rotaru. The event program features footage from the Traveling Academy, commented by Andrei Serban, including comics and visual material by artist Matei Branea as part of his comprehensive journal documenting this summer workshop in Romania, and a short demonstration of exercises with participating actors.

The presentation at Martin E. Segal Theatre Center will be followed by the launch of the album Andrei Serban. My Journeys. Theatre & Opera. The album is the first retrospective of Andrei Serban’s career, in both theatre and opera. The director gathered in two volumes the images of an extraordinary artistic journey, in which the experimental theatre, his successes on the big stages around the world, the collaboration with Peter Brook or the dialogue with the young generations of artists all intermingle. Published in Romanian & English, the album was edited by RCINY and printed by the Romanian Cultural Institute Publishing House in Bucharest. 

The Andrei Serban Traveling Academy was launched at the initiative of Corina Suteu, the director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, and is a laboratory-like setting created for young actors in Romania, allowing them to "evade from what one already knows and reinvent oneself from the scratch", as one of the participating actors referred to his work in the Academy’s workshops. The Academy is organized in Romania and the U.S. by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest.

The first project in this frame resulted in the staging of "Deadly Confession", a theatrical version of the non-fiction novel by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, a performance that succeeded in launching a real debate within Romanian society. The show was premiered at La MaMa E.T.C in New York in October 2007, and was subsequently staged, under Andrei Serban's direction, at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest, and presented throughout Romania, in France and Poland. For the second edition of the academy, Andrei Serban worked with his students from Columbia University on a text by Gianina Carbunariu, the workshop resulting in a staged reading hosted by RCINY in December 2008. 


[Image: the Traveling Academy in Horezu, Romania, summer 2009]